** For the second year, comics shops are hosting the In-store Comic Convention Kick-Off on March 5th. What's the In-store Comic Convention Kick-Off, you may ask? Well, here's the explanation buried a bit on their website:

Convention attendance is on the rise! In March 2015, we tried something that hadn’t been attempted before: we held a live broadcast in over three dozen stores across the country for a full day of convention-style announcements from major publishers, interviews and experiences via live TV. We brought the convention to the stores!

I was intrigued by the idea of this last year but never got a chance to hit a local comic shop to check this out. And like any good convention, they've even started to announce guests.

It sounds like stores have to buy into this event through Diamond so I guess in a month or so we'll see a list of participating stores.

I always joke that Jordo did an amazing thing with Madwoman in that he made the only Moebius book that I don’t like. Even Stan Lee didn’t manage that!!

Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's Madwoman of the Sacred Heart is just a strange book. I first encountered the first half of it back in the late 1990s when Dark Horse published an incomplete version of it. It was only a couple of years ago that Humanoids finally released the whole thing and I haven't gotten the nerve up to revisit the whole thing.

The little bit of latter Moebius I've seen seems like a mixed bag. He worked so hard to minimalize his style that there's the air of ease to it but it also doesn't have the character of his 1970s and 1980s artwork. Of course that may just be part of that there's so little of it that's translated that it's hard to get as lot into his imagination as it is in the translated stories.

Hopefully when Dark Horse starts releasing Moebius's work, they'll start with some of the stuff that hasn't been released in English yet. I would just love to spend time with his Inside Moebius series.

The largest category [of work translated into English and available through Amazon.com], by far are Angoulême award-winners that are not in print. Works by F'Murr, Jacques Martin, Attilio Micheluzzi, Jano, Fred, Pascal Rabaté, and Riad Sattouf can be found in this section of the chart. Notably, eleven of the books are currently available in print as translations (by Dupuy-Berberian, Christophe Blain, Marjane Satrapi, Shigeru Mizuki, Guy Delisle, Christophe Blain, and the aforementioned Riad Sattouf), and one was originally published in English (Ware's Jimmy Corrigan) and one is wordless (Shaun Tan's The Arrival). Add to this the three winners listed as forthcoming: Manuele Fior's Five Thousand Miles Per Second, Alack Sinner by Muñoz and Sampayo, and Paracuellos by Carlos Giménez.

Scott is a recovering English literature major, spending the past 10 years writing about comics. Truthfully, he just doesn't know what to do with his time other than writing about comics. It's a sickness. His old blog is at www.wednesdayshaul.com but he currently blogs and tumbles (is that a verb yet?) at Ilostitatthecomicshop.tumblr.com.